Website credibility relies much on the number of links coming from domains that have an already established authority. These links from trusted sources are called High Authority Backlinks. What are those and how do they work, we gonna find out here.
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How Do You Get High Authority Backlinks
The vast world of the internet that we are exploring through our browsers, may it be on a handheld personal device or on a desktop computer, is comprised of billions of different pages that are on millions of different domains, interconnected to each other the reason why it is called the World Wide Web.
With the browsers being the entrance to the web, it is the search engines that are the receptionist that points us where to go as we dive in the sea of information available online.
These search engines are programmed to deliver the best information available about the query a user enters in the search bar.
Considering the birth of the web, things aren’t this intricate before as it is today.
Just for a quick look back into the history, it was a British Scientist in the name of Tim Berners-Lee who invented the world wide web in 1989 with the purpose of having an automated platform for information-sharing amongst the researchers and academia.
The simple frustration of Berners-Lee turned into a massive technology that we are enjoying today as the internationalization of the world wide web began around 2004 to 2005 by having Unicode as the standard for encoding data across the globe.
So what with the history after all? This actually gives us the understanding that the very purpose of the web is to share valuable, trustworthy, and factual information amongst people.
Fast-tracking back to our present time, this has been the very core of responsible data sharing. However, enterprising individuals or groups of people and moreover, scammers and people with malicious intent have also been venturing the web and are widely just around the surface of the search engines.
That’s one reason that search engine companies continue to develop methods and algorithms that can eliminate the threat of misinformation and one of which has come in the form of Authority.
Not only that Authority helps to thwart misinformation, it has also been very beneficial to the commercial market on which rose the prominence of the Search Engine Optimization that helps domain owners have their brands become authoritative enough to become the top listing in the search engine results page.
Before we dig in about Authority in the context of SEO and on how to get high-authority backlinks, let’s take a quick glance at the three pillars of SEO.
What are the Three Pillars of SEO?
In layman’s terms, Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your website or domain become easily found when a user searches in the search engine.
While it sounds pretty easy, it’s technically challenging, just not to say it’s complicated or difficult. But yes, doing SEO is really a technical thing that needs constant studying.
As we’ve mentioned, making your website easily visible in the search engine would sound easy until you’ll find out that there are millions of other sites and domains you are in competition with.
This is just for a single search query or niche that your page is all about. Not to mention that there are different search engines and they have different algorithms at work.
So, generally speaking, what are the three pillars of SEO?
Relevance
One of the widely accepted pillars of Search Engine optimization is Relevance.
The world as we know it today is ever-changing and it is fast-paced. There could be information in the ’80s and ’90s that are no longer relevant for today’s situation.
This pillar of SEO has an impact on all aspects of it from the technicality of the approaches to the kind of content being published in your domain.
Just to give an example, with Google having the majority of search engine usage market share, they have released their Webmaster Guidelines and these guidelines are updated each year and this means that some approaches that were allowed or not allowed on 2018 could be different in 2021.
Also, keep in mind that your content must be relevant to the niche or target keyword it is meant to be. From the texts to the graphics and even up to the domain names, relevance is a must.
Trust
Your domain could be relevant in terms of technical SEO and so as with your content but if the latter is fictitious, erroneous, or misinforming, nobody would trust that.
Trust is one of the very important pillars of SEO not only that quality backlinks and organic traffic comes from this, but search engine algorithms have also developed their web crawlers to somehow understand the content through powerful artificial intelligence.
This might sound futuristic but yes, the future is now.
Authority
You could’ve come across commercials with taglines saying “The Soda Authority”, or, “The Showbiz Authority”, which pretty much talk about how reliable and how they are patronized by many. This is what authority is all about.
All the said pillars of SEO is vital as it reflects on how effective your researches, campaigns, and implementation as it will improve the visibility of your domain or page in the SERP.
What is Authority in SEO?
Now, to further understand what is Authority in the context of SEO, we can think of this like you’re asking for the direction to the house of the town leader.
Since everybody knows where the town leader lives as he is an authority in that town, everyone you’ll ask around will point you to a single location.
Yes, you might bump with a bystander who knows someone who knows, but eventually, you’ll still end up with the same location.
This is analogous to the definition of Authority in SEO. These people pointing you to the right location are like backlinks.
Authority in SEO is the ability of your website to influence other domains through links and relative content as it is a reference point of many external domains and pages through links.
An SEO Company MOZ have patented a metric called Page Authority and Domain Authority. Let’s dig deeper on the analogy of our exmpale to these metrics.
Page Authority
Using 40 different SEO factors, MOZ developed a score that will predict how well a page would rank in the search engine results page, particularly of Google, in comparison with other pages in the SERP.
Based on our example, there are other claimants that they are the town leader. Apparently, upon asking a bunch of people around the town, some say that town leader A lives on location A and some say that there is town leader B and lives in location B.
Now, Page Authority calculates the score based on links, how many are they, how reliable are they, how trustworthy are they, and such.
Continuing our example, you might’ve asked a drunk guy, a bystander from another place, and a local merchant who says he’s a friend of Town leader A that the correct place is Location A and the rightful town leader is A.
However, you’ve come to ask a fire officer, the town secretary, that the town leader is B and is living at location B.
These example represent some of the factors computed by the Page Authority such as:
- Top-Level Domains
- Anchor Texts
- Subdomain Links
to name a few. The Page Authority is computed in a 100-point logarithmic scale using these factors and a bunch of others and the Google SERP as the input and is being processed by MOZ Machine Learning to generate a predictive score of a single page.
Domain Authority
On the other hand, whilst using the same approach on score calculations, Domain Authority is the score for the entirety of the whole domain encompassing the scores of each page, subdomains, and its contents.
What are Authoritative Links?
We now understand the value of authority in the context of SEO which will help us understand how we define an Authoritative Link.
To simply put it, a link coming from a credible site with high authority value pointing to your own page or domain best describe an Authoritative Link.
Links coming from websites ending with .gov, .edu are by default authoritative sites as they are used only by government and educational institutions per se.
However, these aren’t the only sites where you can obtain high-authority links, and besides, you can’t obtain every backlink from these institutions after all, unless your niche is about government or education.
As we’ve described what authoritative links are, we also ought to know which can be considered a good source of these links. Of course, these are those Authority Domains.
These domains have pretty much a great value that it is considered an authority but how could we qualify and quantify them?
Valuable Content
No matter how people rotate the world of SEO, the content will always be the king. It is the very soul of a website and the entirety of the domain. Who’s gonna visit an empty domain anyways?
The first qualifying factor for an authority domain is the quality of the content they as they can fulfill the three pillars of SEO we’ve mentioned earlier – trustworthy, relevant, and, authoritative.
This means that the blog posts and articles in these domains are reliable sources of information that could influence other domains as they refer to it for validity.
Quality Links
With valuable content comes quality links.
Authority domains have their pages having outbound links to equal or greater authority domains where they refer their information from reliable sources such as trusted news channels, educational institution domains, and web-based online journals.
Not only that they have quality outbound links, but they also have quality inbound links that from other domains with good DA/PA scores as well.
There are tons of webmaster tools that you can use to check the backlink profile of the authority site you want to check just to be sure you’re investing in the right one.
Traffic
Authority sites can be set apart amongst others on this single factor – Organic Traffic.
One could spend a stash of cash to appear on the ads section of the SERP but still won’t get the traffic it was looking for.
One reason is that we can actually say that with quality content comes organic traffic and it is amplified with the quality links that are crossing on authority domains.
Authority sites have guaranteed organic traffic to support their claim no wonder they would definitely rank amongst the 10 on the search engine results page.
But of course, the facade is not always what’s inside so you can also check the traffic volume using webmaster tools available online.
Website Health
Another technical factor that authority sites have is a healthy website. What is considered healthy?
Most authority sites have their page loading time at one second or below. This means that the websites were built optimized where graphics and other backend elements are loaded fast.
Aside from this, they have almost zero 301s and 404s within their domains as domain authority is hurt if there are lots of broken links.
What are High-Authority Backlinks?
As we’ve defined what authoritative links are, there are also these links that are of higher value. These are the High-Authority Backlinks.
These backlinks are coming from domains that have a DA score of 70 and above. This score can tell us a lot about how the website does.
Now, while this is the general standard, there are also variations on the threshold of what score is considered as high-authority as it is relative to the number of people that are within the niche.
Also, take note that not all domains that have DA scores soaring high are really valuable so it is important to do good research on where to source your backlink.
Ways To Get High-Authority Backlinks
You’ve come a long way here and you must’ve understood the discussions above as it will help us on how are we to get High-Authority Backlinks.
Having a good amount of high-authority backlinks have a great impact on your website ranking as these domains drive your own domain credibility, thus, making your website climb the ladder of search engine results page.
1. Keyword Research and Niche Targetting
The first step to get high-authority backlinks begins with researching your target niche, geo-location, and keywords.
Doing this will help you narrow down your choices of where to source valuable backlinks.
Knowing your target niche and keywords on your location will help you identify which sites are ranking best on those queries.
After learning those sites, you check their backlink profiles and find where they source their authority backlinks.
While you understand the strength of your competitors, you will also learn their weaknesses as well as their sources.
Also, this will help you with your content creation on which powerful keywords to use and best anchor text to choose as well as the Latent Semantic Index.
2. Technical Analysis of Authority Domain Pool
Once you’ve gathered the list of prospective domains that you’ve found on your keyword research, do technical analysis on those domains.
Check out for:
- Domain Authority Score
As mentioned, a DA score of 70 and above is ideal but not always the case. Check for other indicators like PA scores and Backlink Scores.
- Pag Authority Score
A PA score of 50 to 60 is considered ideal by many SEO geeks and webmasters. Coupling this with other factors will help you trim down your selection for sourcing High-Authority backlinks.
- Trust Flow/Citation Flow Ratio
Another metric that you want to check is the Majestic SEO TF/CF ratio. This metric is a score of how much “link juices” it can provide as a domain with the ideal TF/CF ratio of 1:2.
It is important to take note the very low TF score could be considered not trustworthy and a very high TF score is considered spammy.
- Monthly Traffic Volume
Importantly, check for the domain’s traffic volume as this will support the legitimacy of the claim of its DA/PA scores.
High-Authority Backlinks can be garnered from domains that have High DA/PA score supported with high monthly traffic volume.
- Backlink Score
While the domain could look appealing as it has a high backlink score, it’s not always the case.
What matters most is the quality of backlinks that flow to the domain that you’re trying to source so do backlink research and analysis on the target domain you’ve got on your keyword research list.
These factors will help you narrow down and gauge which domains would be the great source for high-authority backlinks.
3. Guest Posting
Once in a while, invest in doing guest posting on reliable sites such as trusted news networks, local brands, academic institutions, and other authority websites.
Establish a good professional relationship with them and with the help of smart keyword research deliver quality content that can drive traffic to your site at the same time gaining high-authority backlinks.
Get Started
The effects of having to gain high-authority backlinks to your website is not an overnight process but rather, a continuous campaign.
There could be small wins to celebrate and some setbacks to learn from so it is important to set a goal, strategize the campaign, and tweak the implementation if so needed to see the fruits of your labor on getting high-authority backlinks.
